


The Night is Full of Holes

by LemonBubble



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Episode: e027 First Date, M/M, Missing Scene, POV Carlos (Welcome to Night Vale)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-08
Updated: 2013-10-08
Packaged: 2017-12-28 20:23:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/996172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LemonBubble/pseuds/LemonBubble
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I was almost swallowed by a cloud of malevolent shadow energy on the drive home and I hardly even noticed."</p><p>Cecil was swallowed by a cloud of malevolent shadow energy, he just doesn't remember. Carlos does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Night is Full of Holes

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt fill for [this](http://nightvalecommunitykink.dreamwidth.org/822.html?thread=499510#cmt499510).
> 
> I tried, I hope this is ok.

It was the end of the date and Carlos really had meant to invite Cecil inside - just for… coffee, or maybe to talk a little longer, nothing more - but then the buzzing shadow he had noticed earlier in the day had started taking over the town. It seemed like he should probably do something about that.

“I should probably do something about this buzzing shadow thing.” He said when Cecil stopped outside the lab. “A few experiments, to see if I can save the town.”

“Oh? Do you need any help with that?” Cecil asked, and he sounded so genuinely eager that Carlos almost said yes, but…

“No, a scientist is self-reliant. It’s the first thing a scientist is.” He said instead, deciding that it could be dangerous and it would be better if Cecil just got somewhere safe until this was over. He tried not to hear the disappointment in the soft “oh” he got in response.

After a moment of indecision, Carlos kissed Cecil. He got out of the car and into the lab in one movement, not giving himself time to wonder if he had made the right decision or not. He leaned against the lab door and let out a deep breath.

Well. That wasn’t so bad. It could have gone better (tree experiments? Really? What had he been thinking _there_?), but it also could have gone worse, so, all in all, Carlos reckoned it was a good night. He just hoped that Cecil agreed, especially since he would be telling the whole town about it. There was no question about that.

Carlos looked out the window at the sound of a car starting up. He watched Cecil drive away while he tried to stop thinking about the date and start thinking about the shadow problem. Assuming it was a problem, anyway. Maybe this was just something that happened every second Saturday in July? But he was sure Cecil would have said something if it was, so Carlos was going to assume it was a problem and try to fix it. Maybe he could do something with lasers? They were shadows, which are caused by an absence of light, so light could counter them? If that was the case then he could go to bed and just let nature deal with it when the sun rose, but he would have to do a few tests to make sure. It would be good if he could get a shadow person to test on, but how could he get them to co-operate? Once someone turned into a shadow they didn’t seem to move, but not in a frozen in place way, more like thy just didn’t have anywhere to go.

Lost in thought, Carlos had long since stopped focusing on what was out the window. It was only when he was turning away that he realised he could still see Cecil’s car, and that it wasn’t moving.

 _Bad._ His mind provided helpfully. _Very bad._ He added. _Really very not good at all._ There was a reason he hadn’t been an English major.

Carlos opened the door of the lab and looked out cautiously. The night air was filled with the buzzing hum of the shadows, but he could only see one nearby, out on the street near Cecil’s car. Carlos grabbed the torch he kept by the door for emergencies before going out. It probably wouldn’t help, but it was better than nothing.

He covered the short distance to the car easily, keeping a careful eye on the shadow person. It seemed to have turned towards him, but it hadn’t moved. Carlos leaned down and looked in the car window. Cecil was just sitting there, hands still on the wheel. He looked fine. Carlos tapped on the window, but Cecil didn’t respond.

“Cecil?” Carlos tried. Still nothing. He opened the car door. Cecil seemed to be… humming? Or was it buzzing? Whichever it was, it sounded just like the sound the shadows made. “Ah. Um.”

Carlos hesitated, trying to think what he could do. Cecil didn’t look like a shadow person yes, but he wasn’t responding to Carlos at all. He didn’t even blink when Carlos waved a hand in front of his face. Cecil was usually so animated and vocal, it was deeply unsettling to see him so silent and still now.

“Can you get out of the car, Cecil?” Carlos asked, not really expecting an answer. He didn’t get one. “Would you like to come inside?” He tried again, but the only response he got was a slightly louder buzzing. It would be so much easier to help Cecil if he was in the lab, but Carlos didn’t want to risk touching him and becoming a buzzing shadow himself. Then who would save the town? And Cecil? Carlos noticed that Cecil’s feet were only visible as an absence of light that was slowly spreading.

Right. It was probably time to go then. Carlos hated the idea of just abandoning Cecil to be consumed by the shadow ( _possibly irreversibly? No, no, don’t think like that, there must be a way to reverse it._ ), but there was nothing else he could do, not without risking his own safety. Maybe that was selfish, but maybe the shadow person on the other side of the car had gotten closer and maybe Carlos had gotten a little most cautious since the Incident Under The Bowling Alley. So he retreated back to the lab, turned on all the lights as a shield and tried not to think about Cecil.

Now wasn’t the time for personal thoughts. Now was the time for thinking hard about Science.

What was the shadow thing? Carlos paced up and down the well lit room as he thought. It was an absence of light. It made a noise. Those were the two main components - sound and darkness. So the simplest way to fight it would be with sound and light, right? Just try to cancel it out. Carlos needed to test his hypotheses, which he needed a buzzing shadow for. Good thing there was one out by… Carlos hesitated in his pacing. Out by Cecil’s car. Which meant he would have to go outside and see Cecil again. Carlos wasn’t sure he could watch the man he l- liked a lot slowly turning into a humming darkness, but he couldn’t risk finding another buzzing shadow, but he also couldn’t waste time and energy looking for someone else to test on for his personal comfort.

Carlos grabbed a couple of laser pointers (red and green, in case that made a difference), a bright pen light, and a small digital recorder before venturing outside again. He noted that the buzzing was louder and that he had left Cecil’s car door open. Very deliberately not looking in the car, Carlos started his tests, first pointing the lasers, then the pen light at the shadow and quietly recording notes on the reactions he got ( _”No apparent reaction to the laser pointers, seems to flinch at the white light”_ ). He then recorded 30 seconds of uninterrupted buzzing, getting as close to the shadow as he dared to do so. When he finished that he looked in the car. For… science, to observe the process, and not in any way out of concern for his b- friend.

The blackness had risen to Cecil’s middle, already half shadow. Carlos didn’t understand why he was changing so slowly when everyone else had apparently changed instantly, but he didn’t question it for now. Instead he silently thanked gods he didn’t believe in for giving him time before… well, he didn’t really know what would happen if Cecil went full shadow being. Carlos didn’t know if anything would happen at all, or if it was just a temporary and harmless possession (and _there’s_ something he would never have thought before Night Vale), but he would rather not find out. As far as Carlos was concerned, the sooner he fixed this, the better.

“You’re going to be ok, Cecil.” He said out loud, more to reassure himself than anything else. He went back into his lab and plugged the recorder into the nearest computer, pulling up an open-source, easy to use audio editing program. If he could just do that thing where the sound waves were opposite each other and they cancelled out, maybe that would cancel out the shadow thing too? Carlos couldn’t even remember what that was called, it was a physics thing and he wasn’t a physicist. Since coming to Night Vale, though, he had learned to do a lot of things outside his area of expertise. He messed with the recording of the buzzing for a few minutes until he thought he had something that would work.

This time Carlos took the brightest torch he had and a small speaker he found with him when he went back outside. He went to the car first. The shadow had spread to Cecil’s neck, leaving only his head untouched, still staring blankly at the road.

“I’m going to fix this, Cecil.” Carlos promised, not feeling as confident as he sounded. “Just… please be ok.” He was starting to understand how Cecil had felt during the Incident Under The Bowling Alley. It had been almost a week before Carlos had heard a recording of the show from that night. He had never heard Cecil break down on air like that, he didn’t think anyone had. And it had been because of Carlos.

But Cecil had had a pre-recorded PSA to hide behind, and someone else had fixed the problem. Carlos didn’t have that luxury. As much as he would like to let someone else deal with this problem, there was no one else, so right now he had to keep being methodical and objective, no matter how hard that was with the man he lo- really liked slowly turning into something he might not come back from.

So that was what he did, methodically testing first the light on it’s own (the shadow wavered a little), then the anti-buzzing sound (the shadow wavered in a different direction), and finally the combination of the two. At that the buzzing shadow faded from a solid darkness to a light, hazy smoke, hiding a vaguely familiar woman in it. As soon as Carlos stopped the anti-noise or moved the light, the blackness formed up again, but it seemed like he was closer to a solution. He just needed… a brighter light, a louder noise, and some way to spread them both across the whole town.

Carlos retreated to the lab, spending half an hour trying to work out how to flood the whole town with light before he realised the obvious solution - wait for sunrise. Then there was the issue of the sound, but he had all night, the internet, and a lab full of equipment to solve that problem. He decided he would build some kind of giant speaker and set it up on the roof. The only thing he wasn’t sure about was if anyone would actually survive until morning. Carlos had no way of knowing if the shadow was somehow eating away at memories or personalities, but he also couldn’t think of another solution. He would just have to wait until sunrise and hope for the best.

-

Carlos didn’t sleep that night. He would periodically check on Cecil, at least until midnight when he had been totally consumed by the shadow. Carlos just focused on finishing the giant speaker after that, anything to keep himself busy. He hated waiting, and it was even worse knowing that the fate of the town was in his hands and feeling like there was nothing else he could do. He had tried to fix Cecil and the person standing in the street already, but he didn’t have a light bright enough. Not long after that, Carlos discovered that the buzzing shadows would move away from the anti-buzzing noise, so he spent the last hours of darkness going through buildings and herding shadow people outside or over to windows by playing the sound through a megaphone he had commandeered from a shadow that had probably been a secret police officer.

Carlos had never been more grateful to see the sun rising. He headed back to the lab as soon as he noticed the sky lightening and set up his improvised speaker on the roof. By the time it was light enough to see in colour the anti-buzzing noise was playing as loud as Carlos could make it. He looked down at the street in time to see Cecil’s car disappearing around a corner. The shadow that had been standing in the street all night was a person again, so Carlos had to assume that had happened to Cecil too.

Just to be sure, though, he pulled out his phone and tapped out a quick text.

_Are you ok?_

It was a long, anxious few minutes before he got a reply.

_carlos you just kissed me!!! im more than ok!! <3_

Carlos hesitated, not sure what to make of that. Did… Cecil not remember? Carlos was suddenly hit with a wave of exhaustion, the sleepless night catching up with him all at once. It had been a long time since he was last up until sunrise and he found it hard to think clearly now. He should… ask Cecil what he remembered and… make sure everyone was ok, and turn off the speaker, and write down his findings, in case this happened again and, and…

Carlos blinked. When he opened his eyes, the sun was much higher in the sky and a Sheriff’s Secret Police officer was standing in front of him, scribbling on a piece of paper. Two others were in the background, pulling apart the giant speaker, which was silent. The officer handed Carlos the sheet of paper and stomped off without saying anything. He looked at it sleepily. It told him he had an official warning for noise and two fines, one for “unauthorised ownership of a speaker larger than a ham”, and one for “public sleeping without a permit”.

The police confiscated the speaker, which annoyed Carlos because he built it himself, but he wasn’t about to argue with them. Especially since they were human and not buzzing shadows, so he assumed the speaker had done it’s job. He dragged himself back down to the lab and wrote something semi-coherent about what had happened before falling into bed in the tiny apartment behind the lab.

He didn’t remember about talking to Cecil until the evening’s show, and when he called afterward Cecil claimed he remembered nothing about the night between Carlos leaving and him driving home. He even said he hadn’t noticed that it had gone from the middle of the night to sunrise in, apparently, a few seconds.

Cecil simply didn’t remember and Carlos envied him. He didn’t go into detail telling him what happened though, just leaving it at “I saved the town,” and being grateful that Cecil was, apparently, unchanged by the ordeal.

Carlos did a lot of ethanol based chemistry with his liver that night. After all, wasn’t that the town motto? Say nothing and drink to forget.

**Author's Note:**

> When in doubt, use tenuously related song lyrics for your title.
> 
> Feedback is greatly appreciated. Also, I edited this in the middle of the night so there are probably a couple of typos in there. Tell me if you spot one.


End file.
